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The Patient Without a Past
India has issued 80 crore digital health IDs. Almost none are attached to a working medical record. Tenth in a series on India's data infrastructure.
Jun 15
•
Arun Rajiah
The Server Needs Water
India is building AI infrastructure on the same physical foundation it never finished fixing.
Jun 9
•
Arun Rajiah
1
The Invisible Herd
India's dairy sector supports 80 million farmers and 5% of GDP. The state cannot tell you which farmer owns which animal, where the animal is today, or…
Jun 8
•
Arun Rajiah
The Bottle and the Budget: India's Complicated Love Affair with Liquor
In Telangana, the government runs liquor shops.
Jun 4
•
Arun Rajiah
2
The Country That Drinks From a Mine It Cannot See
India withdraws a quarter of the world's groundwater every year. It does not know how many of its pumps are running, what they extract, or how long the…
Jun 1
•
Arun Rajiah
May 2026
The Country That Does Not Know Who Owns What
India has digitised almost every rural land record. It still cannot tell you who owns which piece of ground — and that is why two-thirds of its courts…
May 25
•
Arun Rajiah
2
1
The Villages India Cannot See
The administrative geography of rural India — where the official map, the census, the revenue record, and the panchayat register all disagree about what…
May 18
•
Arun Rajiah
1
India Counts Nothing. Then Plans Everything.
The governance data debt — why we run a $4 trillion economy and a 1.4 billion person democracy on statistics that are either missing, late, or…
May 11
•
Arun Rajiah
2
1
The AI Revolution Is Happening in English. 900 Million Indians Don't Speak It.
Why India's greatest civilisational asset — its language diversity — is becoming its biggest AI liability, and what a multilingual-first architecture…
May 4
•
Arun Rajiah
April 2026
The Republic of the Square Plot
How a 1940s field-survey procedure decides whether sixty crore Indian farmers get an insurance payout. The eighth essay in a continuing series on…
Apr 28
•
Arun Rajiah
India's New Zamindars Don't Own Land — They Own Your Data
Priya runs a kirana store in east Delhi.
Apr 20
•
Arun Rajiah
2
Agriculture's Real Problem Isn't the Farmer — It's That We're Running Why India's agricultural crisis is really a data crisis — and what a…
Last monsoon, I sat in a plastic chair in a mandi yard outside Thanjavur, watching a paddy farmer named Selvam negotiate the sale of his entire season’s…
Apr 6
•
Arun Rajiah
2
2
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